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Why does IOBA offer scholarships to seminars and classes for our members? Because IOBA wants all its member booksellers to be the best booksellers they can be. Their perspective on bookselling will have widened, they will have met a faculty whose bookselling knowledge is deep and varied, and they will have made friends with fellow seminarians who include librarians and book collectors, along with other booksellers. These are good relationships to forge! An application that wi

Firstly, let me express again my thanks to the IOBA scholarship committee and to the membership at large for their support with the scholarship that I received. As Mike alluded to, CABS benefits the entire trade, not just the people who attend. Mike put it very elegantly when he talked about the “vibrant, vital ecosystem” that is the bookselling trade, and CABS does a great deal to foster and support this. So, what makes CABS so great? There are many dimensions to it. *Facult

Ok, clever titling aside, (and the humor doesn’t get any better I’m afraid), I wanted to take a moment to share what I got out of CABS. Paul Shelly, a new friend and colleague from Edmonton, did a terrific job of detailing what this year’s seminarians experienced this past week; 54 of us by my count which we were told was one of the biggest classes to date. Regrettably, I did not take many photos though this one does sum up Paul’s comment about the spartan digs. Now, as a ver

As far as the faculty is concerned, we could not have been more fortunate to share in the wisdom and scholarship of the assembled. The week began with a keynote address by Lisa Baskin, a prolific collector who encouraged us on how rewarding, personally and financially, it could be to build a thoughtful collection. The lesson she left behind was, “You cannot do it alone.” Katherine Reagan, Curator of Rare Books and Collections at Cornell University immersed the class in an ele

I would like to take a moment to talk about antiquarian book fairs: what they are; who attends them; where they have been and where they are going; why they are important; and how I as a bookseller fit into all this. My hope is that this will provide a touchstone for various groups: those who are unfamiliar with book fairs should be able to read this, understand their purpose, and decide whether they are interested in visiting one; those who have shopped at book fairs before

As told by Blake to Colleen Barrett, Cataloguer Blake joined the staff of the Philadelphia Rare Books & Manuscripts Company (PRB&M), an antiquarian bookstore in northeast Philly, in late 2011. This loveable tabby cat had big paws to fill as her predecessor Sessa had many admirers, his own email address, and even his own division of the business: “SessaBks,” which continues to offer good used, “medium rare,” and simply serendipitous stock complementing our core early books of

Table of Contents From the Editor: Tim Doyle From the Incoming IOBA President: Joan White Book Blogging: Don’t Do What I Do: Rachel Jagareski Serendipity in Bookselling: Tim Doyle Bibliofile: Tim Doyle Embracing the Unexpected: Joe Perlman

Welcome to the Spring 2016 issue of The Standard, the journal of the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA). One month ago, incoming IOBA President Joan White approached me about taking over as Editor, and re-booting The Standard. The journal was always intended to be a quarterly publication, not that one could tell based on the five issues published in the last six years. I was guest editor of the Summer 2013 issue (the last before the recent, lengthy hiatus) and